Category: Research

UMM CSci officially rocks!

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We’re back safe and sound from an extremely successful MICS conference, at least in terms of our CSci students doing some great work. One of our teams (Andy Korth, Tyler Hutchison, and Scott Lembcke, L to R in photo) did in fact take first (out of 42 teams) in the programming contest.

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We were pretty sure that we were going to hear UMM’s name called out during the programming contest awards, but we didn’t know how the best student paper awards were likely to go. We had four student papers in the pool, and they were all good work, so it certainly seemed possible, but you never know with these things. We were thus very excited when Tyler and Andy received one of the two best undergraduate paper awards for the paper that they did with me! The photo above is Tyler during their presentation (they did it jointly), with some of his excellent artwork visible in the slide.

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All our students did a great job and represented UMM well. As you can see from the photo above (taken right after the programming contest ended), they didn’t take it too seriously, which was indicative of our students’ general attitude towards the event. They did good work, had a good time, and got along really well together. More than one person actually commented on what cool students we had, and I must say I agree :-). Well done all!

I’ve posted a bunch of photos from the event on my events account on Flickr, and another set with too many shots from the robot competition. (We didn’t have any teams entered in that competition.) None of these are cleaned and edited, so take them for what they are (which isn’t high art!).

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Greetings from MICS 2007

Teamwork
We’ve arrived without incident in Grand Forks, ND, for MICS 2007. To be blunt, I tend to not come to MICS very often because the quality of the presentations generally isn’t very impressive (not the best examples of scientists as great communicators, I’m afraid).

We have four UMM student talks at this year’s conference, including a talk by two students I’ve been working with on the impact of geography and local mating on diversity in evolutionary computation. Elena set up an evening practice session Wednesday where we could to see and provide feedback on the four talks, and they were quite impressive, so I’m quite confident about those presentations.

Unfortunately, I’m not so confident concerning the other presentations, and the PowerPoint Phluff alone may induce an aneurysm before we’re done. We’re currently being droned at by a panel of industry people talking about the state of the field (or some such – not clear what the point of this is), and a guy from Rockwell Collins just did his darnest to make interesting material really unfocused and hard to listen to. Sigh. The next guy (from Great Plains/Microsoft) was much more interesting, and seemed to have a point and focus. And thus we have what is likely to be a microcosm of the weekend.

Quote for the day: “If you don’t do at least a billion dollars in sales, you’re really just a rounding error at Microsoft.” Yikes! Sadly these industry guys all seemed to see this as a recruiting opportunity at least as much as a chance to share information with their audience.

They have good wireless, though, so if nothing else I can catch up on e-mail and bury you in content free bored-conference-blogging :-).

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